On a balmy summer afternoon in 1994, Shaheena and her brother Shajaad went shopping in Srinagar, summer capital of Indian Kashmir. Little did Shaheena realize she would never see her brother again. Twenty-four-year-old Shajaad, a clerk in Srinagar?s high court, was about to be married. As Shaheena helped him pick out jewelry for his bride-to-be, officers from the Indian army?s Border Security Force, or BSF, grabbed him and a few other local boys, pushed them into a jeep and drove away.
?Shajaad tried to free himself but failed,? says Shaheena. ?I followed the BSF car in an auto rickshaw. They picked him up right in front of my eyes, but when I reached there, they said they did not pick up Shajaad. I am a well-educated person. I know this happened. I have been saying this for nine years now, but we have not found him.?
That was the last Shaheena saw of her brother. Her decade long search to find him has come at a cost. Her mother died in bitter depression four years after his disappearance. Shaheena had to sell her Srinagar house to pay for court cases she filed against the Indian army. And Shajaad?s fiancée is still unmarried...waiting for him to come back. But Shajaad seems to have vanished without a trace.
The Indian government says in an effort to free Indian Kashmir of militants, security forces must routinely pick up individuals for interrogation if they are thought to be terrorists or providing support to them. Under India?s Prevention of Terrorism Act, security forces have the right to arrest people and explain why later.
But Shaheena and other Srinagar residents say these forces misuse their power and randomly grab civilians who have no connection to militants. In 1994 they formed a group called the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons, or APDP, to protest the arbitrary arrests. APDP?s spokesman and human rights activist Pervez Imroz says more than eight thousand people have disappeared in this way since 1989. Of these, only two have ever been accounted for. He wants the government to explain the disappearances and punish those responsible.
?We have lot of documented cases where the relatives have claimed that they have been arrested by security forces,? he says, ?and later and they don?t know what happened to them. And also in the investigation we are conducting, we have found that unidentified dead bodies have been either thrown in the river or they have been burnt in the forests.?
The Kashmiri government in general has resisted addressing the issue. Last year for the first time in more than a decade, a top government official, Chief Minister of Indian Kashmir, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, admitted that some four thousand people are indeed missing. But the government has yet to provide their names or information about what happened to them.
Muzaffar Beg, a prominent minister in Mr. Sayeed?s government, denies the security forces were involved in the disappearances. He insists the missing people may have gone to join militants in neighboring Pakistan: ?It may very well be that in most cases these people have crossed over to get training or to get arms from across the line of control. There are other cases in which people have been picked up either by militants or people in uniform.?
Magda Wendorff of Amnesty International, however, agrees with the APDP. She says her organization has found that over the past decade the missing range in age from nine to 75. They include lawyers and human rights activists who have nothing to do with militancy.
?Not only the whereabouts of hundreds of people who have disappeared over the past decade remain unknown,? she says, ?but we continue to receive all the time huge numbers of reports. For example, a recent case of a 16-year-old boy: he was mentally retarded and he was picked up only because he did not understand that security forces wanted him to stop.?
Pervez Imroz of the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons says so far 200,000 families who have lost a loved one blame the state government for their disappearance and demand it take action. But Mr. Beg says security forces confront armed militants in Kashmir every day. So it?s not possible to stop all human rights violations. He insists his government is committed to putting an end to the disappearances and punishing those responsible.
